1. The Chipote/Sugarlabs cycling team won a stage in the Rutas Américas race in Uruguay this past week. The big race, the Tour of Uruguay (Vuelta a Uruguay) is not until next month. We have been accumulating some great ideas for learning activities for the children of Uruguay to engage in leading up to and during the race (See Vuelta a Uruguay). We are lacking someone to coordinate these efforts in Uruguay: package up the ideas; get the word out to the teachers and children, etc. Please let me know if you are interested in helping.

2. Speaking of Uruguay, it seems that there is consensus to hold a Sugar Camp in Montevideo in conjunction with Ceibal Jam’s EduJam in May 5–7. The plan is to add two days (Sunday/Monday, May 8, 9) of coding just after the main conference. Details to follow. In the week prior to the Camp, there will be a “Conozco Uruguay” Community Exploration Tour for those interested in seeing Sugar in action in the schools of Uruguay.

We do need to discuss some of the details of the Camp. Please add you ideas to the wiki page.

3. There will also be a Squeakfest in Montevideo at the end of May (26–28 at Universidad Católica del Uruguay).

4. Christian Marc Schmidt and Gary Martin have been holding weekly design meetings. Along with Sascha Silbe and others, we have been making a lot of progress on a number of backlogged issues. You can read the logs here: [2011-02-13], [2011-02-20], [2011-02-27], [2011-03-06] and [2011-03-13]

5. Rather than writing my column for the Sugar Digest, once again I have gotten sucked down a coding rat hole :). My two terrible addictions seem to be coffee and Python. Since I last posted, I have been doing more work on the Turtle Art plugin mechanism. I have two community efforts under way to use plugins: Ian Daniher wrote a plugin for WeDo and Emiliano Pastorino has written a plugin for NXT. (An Arduino plugin is also in the works.) I got lots of great feedback from both of them (as well as Raul and Tony) and made some adjustments that will be part of Release 107.

Also, as part of Release 107 is better handling of shared turtles when using Turtle Art collaboratively. With the help of Simon, Gonzalo, and Tony, I managed to sort out a number of little problems that added up to a lot of confusion: for example, you can no longer drag a turtle that someone else is sharing with you. This fixes a problem with synchronization of shared turtles (#2687). Also, the problem with extra turtles appearing when you open a project under a new ‘nickname’ has been fixed (#2441).

6. I also wrote a new game: Paths. It is based upon a game I played with Oscar Becerra in Lima a few weeks ago. The basic idea is to create closed paths using tiles on an 8×8 grid. A collaborative version will be available soon. Meanwhile, download it and play against the robot.

7. I have also been working on a ‘learn to read’ activity with a Canadian educational foundation. Details available soon.

Help wanted

8. As mentioned above, we need help on the ground in Uruguay for Vuelta a Uruguay.